My Hero Romance: Chapter Nine
{| Chapter Nine The quiet beeping of the heart monitor and the drip of the IV as it falls into the tube that fed right into her skin was all Emilie could worry about. How could anyone do this to such a sweet child? Oh, she knew the answer to that better than anyone and the answer rested in her surname. Akihisa was to blame for the damage done to poor Katsuko. Emilie had to push that hatred to the side when visitors came. They were mostly children, coming with teddy bears and flowers until one child came in with a teacher. They both seemed respectfully solemn given the injuries sustained and the need for resuscitation twice. "Are you a friend of Katsuko's?" Emilie's voice was quiet, unable to hide the cracking as she fought back the need to cry again. She had been here for three days and it still hurt. The tall, lanky blond nodded his head. "I work with her. Toshinori Yagi." He gestured to the seats besides her. "May we?" Emilie nodded, not quite paying attention to the two. "All she ever wanted was to be great, you know? She wanted to put her father to shame and rise above him. All her life, she was told that she would only be good at being an obedient servant to him. She was supposed to take UA down from the inside, but something stopped her, or someone." "Mrs Sato?" The boy, Midoriya, stepped up to the plate and offered her some food. "My mom made it. It's not much but since you've been in the Hospital with Miss Sato, I figured you might be hungry for real food." She laughed. "Ah, you must be Izuku Midoriya. She talked a lot about you." She looked down and sighed. "Thank you for the food." "She talked about me? What did she say?" Midoriya couldn't help his curiosity, but Emilie didn't seem to mind. "You have room, a lot of room, for improvement. But she sees hope and determination in you, something that was robbed from her years ago. She sees herself in you and the other children she fought for." Emilie turned to Toshinori. "You must find Akihisa Sato and make him pay for this. He's gone too far now. He must be stopped." "We're working that." He grunted, nodding his head quickly. "But what do you mean by 'he's gone too far now'?" "He's done this before. Every time she doesn't do as he says, he hurts her. It's just...never been this bad. That's why it's important that you take him down." She grabbed Katsuko's limp hand, holding it tightly. "A hero never kills, but you might need to this time. As long as he lives, he poses a threat to Katsuko's life." Emilie fell silent after that, wondering if the twitch she felt from her hand was real. She shook her head and pardoned herself to the restroom. "You should tell her when she wakes up." Midoriya murmured, casting a sad glance towards Katsuko's body. "She's at least deserving of that. But this family, the Sato family, there's a lot of things we don't know." Toshinori looked at Katsuko's body and felt his eyes narrow. She hadn't lied to him, she had told him all that she could, but in the end she had been the one to suffer the most. She had been the one, stretched past her limit, to keep fighting until he had gotten there when she had fully accepted her fate. Even as she stood, half out of her mind, she had continued to doubt her abilities. She had even said she was a risk to the students, which was far from true since she saved them. But all that time, all that time when she smiled, she was really trying to be like him so she wouldn't be afraid. She had tried so hard to keep this quiet, but now everyone knows that the twisted Akihisa had attempted to murder his own daughter. Everything she had said before passing out was only her going back on her feelings. She was putting herself down to keep herself from being embarrassed. She was suppressing what she should be releasing all because she feared judgement. He was an idiot not to see that. Not to see that she didn't contradict all that he said to annoy him or to even be a better teacher. "How could I not see that?" He murmured to himself, murmuring about how blind and foolish he had been. He bit his lip in though, clearly frustrated. He grew more frustrated when he had realized how hard she had fought to protect the children, but was gifted with more pain than he and Shouta combined. She took so much damage, holding onto the hope that he'd be there. How could he have been so stupid? It was his fault she was here. He could've spared some time to protect her, but here she was, near death because of him. "This is all my fault. I wasn't doing my best, I only worried about how long I could stay as All Might and that blinded me from the fact that she was trying harder than any of us." He held his head in his hands, shaking his head. No amount of regret would wake her up that day, or the five days proceeding his confession of failure, but on the ninth day of her medical induced coma, she had woken up. There was one thing on her mind, though. Who was All Might really?